News has been happening (when hasn't it?) and this week we're rounding up some of the stories that caught our attention in recent days. First, the launch of OpenAI's generative-video product Sora, as we consider what this thing is actually going to be used for, and what sorts of havoc it may wreak. Next, the effects of the EU's Digital Markets Act and the stringent ways that some large platform holders are starting to respond to it (looking at you, Apple). Lastly, the talk out of DICE about the ...
Feb 18, 2024•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 222
We're pleased to welcome Tested's Norman Chan back to the show, fresh off of his first week with the Apple Vision Pro and ready to fill us in on everything from the fitting process at the store to UI shortcuts with your mouth, connecting to an external Mac, the ins and outs of the video passthrough (and your loved ones appearing as ghosts atop Mount Hood), and everything in between. Check out Norm's upcoming Vision Pro video, plus all his other work: https://www.youtube.com/@tested Support the P...
Feb 11, 2024•2 hr 38 min•Ep. 221
PC graphics settings have only gotten more complex in recent years, with new options around AI-driven supersampling, ray tracing, latency reduction, and a bunch of other stuff joining classics like SSAO. We attempt this week to step through the most common settings, with basic explanations and recommendations, as well as our experiences getting things like variable refresh to work, choosing between borderless and fullscreen, debating whether you should just let GeForce Experience do all this for...
Feb 04, 2024•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 220
We begin this month's Q&A with a slightly mind-bending discussion of questions that exist in a quantum state, before falling back to more grounded topics like charging your EV out your apartment window, real-life keyboard shortcuts, why we all ended up on WASD, crowdfunding a Moon landing, speeding up your bulk photo-scanning, and the shameful faux pas of changing your profile picture. Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus epis...
Jan 28, 2024•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 219
Will unearthed a venerable SpaceOrb 360 in his garage recently, which sent us down a rabbit hole chasing all the weird, experimental input devices of the late '90s, back when everyone was just figuring out 3D control in the first-person shooter. Before we all standardized on mice and dual analog sticks, there were apparently a lot of different ways to Frankenstein together trackballs, dials, joints, hinges and more, and this week we try to catalog as much of it as we can. Notes for this ep, incl...
Jan 21, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 218
Another Consumer Electronics Show has come and gone, and we've sifted through the highs and lows to bring you a casual discussion about the stuff that actually mattered (Nvidia's Pulsar G-SYNC tech and Super GPUs, better wireless charging, new screen technologies), the strange and ridiculous (AI-powered cat doors, a robot that parks cars, a whole-mouth toothbrush), plus a bonus lightning round where we attempt to stump each other with real versus fake products. Digital Trends' report on the self...
Jan 14, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 217
The seasonal metaphors continue as we weather a blizzard of great questions from you for the monthly Q&A, this time covering everything from Swiss army knife roles in game development to replacing USB ports, the mythical petabyte retail drive, extending wi-fi across hundreds of feet, whether we'll ever see a 128-bit CPU, L-shaped desks, our auditory sleep strategies, and more. The GDC talk about Bungie's Production Engineering role: https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1025970/Bungie-s-Force-Multiplier...
Jan 07, 2024•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 216
On the final day of 2023, Will is joined by Adam Patrick Murray from PC World to discuss the year that was. We run down the last twelve months of PC and mobile hardware, pick this year's winners (and a few losers) and call out the trends and hardware that we were most excited about in 2023! Plus, scene drama! Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the s...
Dec 31, 2023•2 hr 49 min•Ep. 215
This week, Will is joined by Kishore Hari, who takes us on scientific journey through some of the biggest science stories of the year. Topics include advancements in cancer research, a cure for sickle cell anemia, the Nine Boundaries graph, advances in brain science, the cheapest way to land on the Moon, long-standing math problems solve by amateurs, and the year in science woo. Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, yo...
Dec 24, 2023•56 min•Ep. 214
We had such a surplus of good questions in October and November that this week we're shattering our own precedent and doing a supplemental mid-month Q&A to catch up on topics like how (or whether) to block YouTube ads, the increasing costs of midrange GPUs, the eternal struggle of inputting text with controllers, mixing chocolate milk and lemonade in the same glass (not a euphemism, we swear), pivoting careers mid-life, and more. Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access...
Dec 17, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 213
The temperature outside is plummeting, but the number of cold opens in this episode is skyrocketing! We convene once again this week for our sort-of-semi-annual block of short segments about everything from video game Yule logs to neighbors waging holiday decoration warfare, keeping your CPU from (almost) melting, neglecting your cast iron, maximizing your Panda Express order, and more. Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus epi...
Dec 10, 2023•51 min•Ep. 212
A cornucopia of great questions graced our podcasting table this month, and from it we drew such topics as (not) mixing and matching your RAM, fishing for game saves in AppData, an appreciation of the demoscene past and present, the redundant measurements that are totally the power company's fault, and the unmitigated decadence of the Tim Tam slam. Here's Area 5150, the IBM PC demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zADeLm9g0Zg MartyPC, the IBM PC/XT emulator: https://github.com/dbalsom/martypc Su...
Dec 03, 2023•55 min•Ep. 211
Will's been fortunate to spend a chunk of time with the new Steam Deck OLED, and now it's time to talk through both his firsthand impressions and the list of small-yet-significant upgrades Valve has made to just about everything on the device, from screen size to weight to battery life, heat and cooling, memory bandwidth, and even the color of the power button. Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the cre...
Nov 26, 2023•1 hr•Ep. 210
It's nearly Turkey Day here in the US once again, so it's time to discuss another round of tech we're thankful for, which includes such topics as the year USB-C finally happened (for real), freeing yourself from the single critical computer, the joys of both wireless and wired headphones, powering one computer off of another computer, learning to love YouTube again, and more. Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your ...
Nov 19, 2023•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 209
We've been thinking about troubleshooting lately (because it feels like we've all been doing a lot of it), so in this ep we did a formal rundown of how we approach solving technical problems, both in PCs and otherwise. From the analytical joy of log files to A/B testing and eliminating variables, the dos and don'ts of both searching for and contributing to advice online, and other methods of stepping through the problem, hopefully this ep helps make your problem solving just a little bit easier....
Nov 12, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 208
We're firing up the time machine again this week for another visit to the era when computer coverage was "printed" on "paper" in bound volumes called "magazines." This time, we take a look at the voluminous December 2000 issue of PC Gamer, with a look at the early MMO boom brought on by Ultima Online and EverQuest, a preview of EA's weird social game Majestic, reviews of Voyager: Elite Force, Metal Gear Solid for Windows, and the Geforce 2 Ultra, and a bunch more! Here's the browsable version of...
Nov 05, 2023•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 207
October's terrifying batch of questions hits us like an airborne jack-o-lantern this month, as we discuss topics like: why it's RGB and not RYB, the origin of the computer "wizard," the ethics of tracking your family's movements around the house, the usefulness of a nut milk bag (seriously) for filtering coffee, and perhaps the most Tech Pod email we've ever received from a contributor to not one but two legendary operating systems. Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get acc...
Oct 29, 2023•1 hr 25 min•Ep. 206
This week we're doing some follow-ups on recent episodes to fill in a few blanks. Spurred on by the PS5's Spider-Man 2, we wanted to talk about the recent advent of gaming at 40Hz, and that led us to finally talk in some more depth about Brad's new television set. Will has also been testing a coffee brewer FROM SPAAAACE!!!! or at least co-designed by an astrophysicist, and has some tips on zero-bypass brewing, wetting your paper filters (eww), and more. Some links from this episode: Hisense U8K:...
Oct 22, 2023•1 hr 23 min•Ep. 205
We've got a pleasantly floral potpourri this week, mainly focused on Will's trip report from this weekend's Bay Area Maker Faire, the first time the DIY science and tech show has been held since 2019. If you want to hear about model-size mag-lev trains, personal undersea robots, the cottage industry of R2-D2 replica builders, and more, this is your podcast. If you also want to hear about Brad's contemplation of a PC water cooling conversion and Will's recent questionable RGB projects, that's in ...
Oct 15, 2023•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 204
Following on from our consideration of Google's many terminated products in episode 74, we turn our attention to another graveyard this week, one with a big "Microsoft" on the sign. The company's decades-long policy of trying to supplant market leaders with Microsoft-made equivalents has left us with plenty to talk about, from phones to joysticks, questionable Windows add-ons, an actually superlative streaming service, some very brown portable media players, and plenty more. Big thanks to Killed...
Oct 08, 2023•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 203
A crisp Fall batch of questions has found its way to the show this month, as we attempt to deliver answers about such things as trusting your devices with your biometric data, whether to color-calibrate your screens or not, whether bigger and better screens even matter in the age of ultra-compressed video, the relative utility of network racks and pizza ovens, and more. Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other ...
Oct 01, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 202
Intel held its annual Innovation event this week, and our friend Adam Patrick Murray from PC World was there. Now he's here to fill us in on all the details about the company's big shift to Meteor Lake and beyond, including the embrace of chiplet-style modular CPU design, their ever-shrinking process nodes, major changes to how the CPUs are named, their first "neural processing unit," how complicated it's getting to benchmark all this stuff, and more. Check out some of PCWorld's recent coverage ...
Sep 24, 2023•1 hr 23 min•Ep. 201
Sometimes the events are so current we can't help discussing them, and such is the case with this week's act of self-immolation on the part of Unity and its relationship with the many developers who use its engine to make their games. Plus, iOS 17 and friends are imminent and Will has installed every available *OS beta and is here to talk about some of the new features (VPN on AppleTV?!?), the newly announced iPhones and Watches, and some other stuff! Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod ...
Sep 17, 2023•1 hr 28 min•Ep. 200
Will dons the game developer hat again this week for a deep dive into how a game gets built. No, not the coding and design and art and all that -- we mean how a game gets literally built into a package that you can run on your PC or console, with some in-depth chat about everything from build servers to source and version control of both code and binary assets, pre-baked lighting, creating automated nightlies of your game, partying in TeamCity, and more. Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech P...
Sep 10, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 199
We're back this week with another round of hot tips for making your computing life less annoying, including super secret UI settings, methods of bending digital voice assistants to your will, a low-level Windows hotkey not even Will knew about, the latest PowerToys (since the last time we talked about PowerToys), an easy way to trim videos without encoding them again, the fastest video player in the West, and other tips you won't want to miss! The apps we mentioned in this ep include LosslessCut...
Sep 03, 2023•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 198
Another piping-hot batch of questions is here straight out of the oven (where "the oven" is Discord and our inbox), and we do our best to deliver answers about amassing a collection of Allen wrenches, the seeming fragility of OLED panels, service-nagging from your smart appliances, running dynamic DNS for your home VPN, books about computer history, peated whiskey, and more! Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and o...
Aug 27, 2023•1 hr 25 min•Ep. 197
Since Brad just went through the new-TV-buying-and-setup process (for someone else), we decided it was time for us to look past our classic plasmas and take stock of the modern TV landscape. In this ep we attempt to casually dissect HDMI 2.1 features and HDR standards, and think about why format wars are never going away, which legacy audio connector is getting short shrift these days, why everything is labeled "8K" all of a sudden, when to buy an OLED, and a bunch more. Support the Pod! Contrib...
Aug 20, 2023•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 196
Our friend Wes Fenlon is back, this time to talk about his experiences daily-carrying Samsung's Galaxy Z Flip series of foldable smartphones. By interrogating such topics as whether glass is really meant to bend like that, when a screen protector isn't just a screen protector, how great the Game Boy Advance SP was (very great), and whether Apple might get in on this trend, we analyze whether this a passing fad, or the most exciting thing to happen to phones in some time. Support the Pod! Contrib...
Aug 13, 2023•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 195
We're back this week with the mythical three-peat of updates on topics we've discussed either recently or in the distant past. First, following up on last month's patron episode, we dig into our recent experiences with Wireguard and discuss why it's pretty much the only home VPN game in town. Next we dissect the lessons Will learned about operating an electric vehicle in extreme heat on this year's just-concluded sojourn to Palm Desert. Lastly, Brad does a quick update on cold brewing coffee aft...
Aug 06, 2023•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 194
It's that Q&A time again, so in between waxing philosophical about meteor showers and shipwrecks, we take a few of your questions this week, about the etiquette of color-matched bidet installs, the current state of AM5, a growing army of robot chore-doers, a check-in on our download folders, and the amount of that sweet, sweet pre-war steel in the Empire State Building. Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other ...
Jul 30, 2023•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 193
